Fire hydrants or fire plugs are employed by nearly all municipalities. As with other infrastructure, fire hydrants need to be maintained. The intent of a fire hydrant maintenance program is to keep hydrants in a ready condition through flushing, inspection, lubricating, cleaning and painting. One of the more difficult aspects of a fire hydrant maintenance program is the process of cleaning the hydrant or plug. This is often accomplished by pressure washing or sandblasting the fire hydrant in order to remove dirt, grease and flaking paint from the outer surface of the hydrant. In order to protect the surroundings, a plastic shower cap may be used, along with a small tarp placed over the adjacent sidewalk or lawn. The cleaning process also requires a generator and an air compressor for the pressurized fluid or sand that is being applied to clean the hydrant not to mention a supply of the fluid or sand.
Another way of cleaning the fire hydrant is by a worker manually using a hand held wire brush to remove flaking paint, grease, dirt and the like from the outer surface of the accessible portion of the fire hydrant. As is easily recognized, such work is laborious and time consuming. A single worker is not able to clean very many hydrants or fire plugs in a single day. In order to clean the significant number of fire hydrants which even a midsize municipality employs in a reasonably limited time period, the municipality would need to employ a number of workers for the task.
It would be advantageous to provide a rotary brush system to clean fire hydrants, with the brush system including bristles that contact or are capable of contacting all of the above ground exterior surface of a hydrant or plug. The system could be mounted to a motor vehicle so that an effective and quick cleaning of the fire hydrant can take place by a single worker without the need for ancillary equipment such as generators, air compressors, a supply of cleaning material and the like and without needing multiple personnel during the cleaning process. Such a motorized cleaning system would also eliminate the need for multiple workers to be employed in the fire hydrant cleaning process, as a mechanized system would be significantly faster in cleaning a fire hydrant than would be a manual process for doing so. In other words, it would be advantageous to provide a one man cleaning system in order to reduce the costs to the municipality for cleaning fire hydrants.